Internet speeds

theone8181 · 1 May 2018 at 07:48

So i'm currently on kcom fibre which gives me 100 meg, is there any real world difference if i upgrade to 200 meg? I suspect not but just thought i'd check.

Jamauk · 1 May 2018 at 08:02

I don't know if I'm stuck in the dark ages with this one so I don't know what their infrastructure is like. If that side of things is all good and well then it'll mainly come down to the capability of your router.

APM · 1 May 2018 at 09:02

I find 30 gives me a solid iplayer performance so 100 should allow you to stream to 3 devices at once,if that's ok for you then all good.

BigT · 1 May 2018 at 09:27

It depends on your use case. @APM gives you good guidance for how simultaneous streams will work. The other big bandwidth hogs in the modern day are downloading Linux ISOs from newsgroups and/or torrents and things like games. Not playing them but downloading them and patches. If you do that a lot and it frustrates you then you'll see a difference. Basically if you're not experiencing any annoyances now then you'll probably not notice a difference.

WJA96 · 1 May 2018 at 09:35

Without wanting to appear 'smart' it will be twice as fast. As was pointed out above, anything over 10Mbps will give you smooth video streaming (it just takes a bit longer to fill the buffer when you start) so the next question is "What do you download?" If you routinely download a week or two weeks worth of movies and box-sets from Sky then you will definitely see a difference. If it's just general web browsing and the odd bit of YouTube and iPlayer then probably you'll see no difference. Our office in Salford was recently upgraded from 350Mbps Virgin Fibre to 1Gbps leased line to allow for media transfers and off-site backup and absolutely no-one noticed apart from the guy who runs the back-ups who was able to do a full disaster recovery test over a weekend rather than running into a Bank Holiday Monday as well.

There definitely comes a point where it is 'fast enough'. And I suspect that for most people its anything over 50Mbps. Of course, if you have 4 children all using gaming consoles online simultaneously while trying to stream video then you may want more than 100Mbps.

You'll know yourself when it comes time to upgrade. You'll be sat on the sofa thinking 'This feels really slow tonight'. And that's when you'll know it's time to upgrade.

Shawreyboy · 1 May 2018 at 10:27

I'd have thought Kcom would have had sufficient backhaul infrastructure/NNI link speed to support the higher bandwidths offered, given they have the monopoly in the Kingston/Hull area. I would find it hard to believe there would be a congestion issue as their capacity management should have adequately anticipated the influx of higher speed connectivity to their Network.

A solid gigabit router should be all that's required. Ubiquiti EdgeRouter's seem widely recommended for their feature set and price point.

Shawrey

Shawreyboy · 1 May 2018 at 10:34

WJA96 said:
There definitely comes a point where it is 'fast enough'. And I suspect that for most people its anything over 50Mbps. Of course, if you have 4 children all using gaming consoles online simultaneously while trying to stream video then you may want more than 100Mbps.

Strictly speaking, Gaming uses very little data due to the transmission being done mostly via small UDP packets. The data transfer therefore is only several Megabytes an hour for online gaming. This is why very slow ADSL lines can still cope with gaming as long as the Latency/PING is not too high. Some games use TCP but they are mostly strategy or MMO types.

Fast Internet speed is only really perceivable when transmitting large TCP packets in the form of big file downloads or image heavy websites. The only need for fast internet if you have multiple games consoles would be because the size of the updates are several Gigabytes in size now.

General rule of thumb is, if on slow internet buy a physical copy of the game and hope that updates are few and far between.

Shawrey

Glanza · 1 May 2018 at 10:45

It's one of those things you don't think you'll need but once you've got it it's hard to drop to a slower speed, I started on 200mb Virgin and thought that was fast enough then upgraded to 300 and got a free upgrade to the 350 package.

Downloading games in 10 - 15 minutes is nothing to be sniffed at and if you've got heavy users in the house it's nice having the extra bandwidth to stream in 4k and game at same time without issues.

Shawreyboy · 1 May 2018 at 11:50

Glanza said:
It's one of those things you don't think you'll need but once you've got it it's hard to drop to a slower speed, I started on 200mb Virgin and thought that was fast enough then upgraded to 300 and got a free upgrade to the 350 package.

Downloading games in 10 - 15 minutes is nothing to be sniffed at and if you've got heavy users in the house it's nice having the extra bandwidth to stream in 4k and game at same time without issues.

Ohh trust me - if the parents would allow me to have Virgin cabled into the house I'd jump at the offer. Stuck on highly contended VDSL2 cab (Sky LLU). Used to get 70Mb/s throughput when our cabinet become Fibre enabled but due to contention I get around 50Mb/s throughput now.

Virgin only have the 200Mb option to us which would still be a massive increase but if we got access to the 350Mb/s (with the new Router Firmware) I'd really be pressing the parents to pull the plug on the Sky Fibre and have Virgin pulled in.

Shawrey

Glanza · 1 May 2018 at 11:54

Shawreyboy said:
Ohh trust me - if the parents would allow me to have Virgin cabled into the house I'd jump at the offer. Stuck on highly contended VDSL2 cab (Sky LLU). Used to get 70Mb/s throughput when our cabinet become Fibre enabled but due to contention I get around 50Mb/s throughput now.

Virgin only have the 200Mb option to us which would still be a massive increase but if we got access to the 350Mb/s (with the new Router Firmware) I'd really be pressing the parents to pull the plug on the Sky Fibre and have Virgin pulled in.

Shawrey

Can you not get it cabled for yourself and leave them on Sky if their happy with that? VM have to run their own cable to the house.

Shawreyboy · 1 May 2018 at 12:12

Glanza said:
Can you not get it cabled for yourself and leave them on Sky if their happy with that? VM have to run their own cable to the house.

Well we do have an old NTL cable box (from back in the day) into the Front room and would assume that is where Virgin would cable the new DOCSIS3 into as the trunk is already there for it underground.
My bedroom as at the back of the house and there is no way I can see Virgin cabling there without Excess Construction Charges for cable and trunking beyond the 'normal' entry point to the house.

I'd power line from the Front room to my switch upstairs so it's fairly simple to deployment. In honesty though, it would be an unjustifiable outgoing when we have an already functioning service from Sky. Better money saved to get myself on the property ladder in an area where house prices and rental is at silly amounts per month.

Shawrey

Randomface74 · 1 May 2018 at 12:15

theone8181 said:
is there any real world difference if i upgrade to 200 meg?

Not really. Only some downloads would make use of the extra speed, Steam etc. But most of your day to day stuff will feel exactly the same.

Going over 100MB also makes you review your entire network. No point having 200MB broadband on a 100MB network.

theone8181 · 1 May 2018 at 12:57

True, i suspected as much. I don't often download games, and if i do i believe the ps4 and xbox will do it when theyre in standby anyway.

Cheers

Caged · 1 May 2018 at 20:12

100Mbps doesn't seem to be a Kcom service. They go from 75Mbps to 200Mbps and then 400Mbps.

The difference in upload speed going from the 75Mbps to 200Mbps is 20Mbps to 35Mbps - I'd say that's worth considering.

theone8181 · 1 May 2018 at 21:44

It was several years ago when i got fibre. It still gives me that speed i was just curious looking at the options. I think i have something like 5 meg up but not sure what the benefit of that being higher would be. Unfortunately i need more than 400 gig a month for a limit.

WJA96 · 2 May 2018 at 09:09

Caged said:
100Mbps doesn't seem to be a Kcom service. They go from 75Mbps to 200Mbps and then 400Mbps.

The difference in upload speed going from the 75Mbps to 200Mbps is 20Mbps to 35Mbps - I'd say that's worth considering.

The problem with looking at available options today is quite often there are many legacy services in place. For example, last year Vigin Business had a 350/10 no fixed IP service, a 350/20 with one fixed IP and a 350/50 with 12 fixed IP addresses. Today it’s 350/7, 350/15 and 350/20. That’s obviously not a lot different, but different enough. KCom did used to do a 100Mbps service that they dropped.

As for going from 100 to 200 comparing to going from 20 to 35 it’s not really the same. Time perception is a very odd concept. While I wouldn’t argue that 200Mbps is faster than 100Mbps I would query if the user experience will be significantly better given the OPs initial statements about usage.

And then he’s posted that he needs in excess of 400Gb transfer per month! With that much data he probably would notice a benefit from the faster service.

WJA96 · 2 May 2018 at 09:11

theone8181 said:
It was several years ago when i got fibre. It still gives me that speed i was just curious looking at the options. I think i have something like 5 meg up but not sure what the benefit of that being higher would be. Unfortunately i need more than 400 gig a month for a limit.

If you are using over 400Gb of data then I would definitely say you’ll see a benefit. That’s a lot. That’s like downloading 15 full length movies per day, 7 days per week.

theone8181 · 2 May 2018 at 13:02

To put it in context ive been downloading a few games, watching 4k netflix (and my wife also does), watching youtube and lots of general streaming. I think its £2 more a month to jump from 100 to 200. But its the upload thats the biggest improvement, thats 5 upto 35.

Caged · 2 May 2018 at 16:55

WJA96 said:
As for going from 100 to 200 comparing to going from 20 to 35 it’s not really the same. Time perception is a very odd concept. While I wouldn’t argue that 200Mbps is faster than 100Mbps I would query if the user experience will be significantly better given the OPs initial statements about usage.

I was just pointing out that the upload speed almost doubles, so if you upload then it's worth considering a package change even if the increased download speed doesn't mean much to you.

V F · 2 May 2018 at 19:04

Glanza said:
It's one of those things you don't think you'll need but once you've got it it's hard to drop to a slower speed, I started on 200mb Virgin and thought that was fast enough then upgraded to 300 and got a free upgrade to the 350 package.

Downloading games in 10 - 15 minutes is nothing to be sniffed at and if you've got heavy users in the house it's nice having the extra bandwidth to stream in 4k and game at same time without issues.

This has happened to me. Started 15th last month. The line went down and came back to 40 odd Meg. I've got screenshots of my connection with 55 - 61MB for hundreds of hours. Now Sky say the best my line can do is 40MB. They sent out an engineer, he saw the screenshots and he said he doesn't know why. So I asked Sky, why am I now paying for Sky Pro that is now Max when I'm getting the same speeds on Unlimited. They don't know.

Yesterday I asked to be downgraded to Sky Fibre Unlimited, which I also have screenshots of that was 39999/9999. Now the best I can get is 29999/7102. Yesterday I had 41180 down and none of their tech support want to help even though I have proof. All they keep saying, sorry this is the best your line is capable of.

Let alone my pings are all shot.

Game updates, app updates, OS updates are so slow now.